Before generating invoices for your clients, it's important to set up your billing options, Bill Theme, and payment terms.

In this chapter, you will learn how to set up billing options such as defining taxes and time rounding. You will be introduced to Clio's bill customization feature and, finally, you will learn how to apply interest and early payment discounts.

Apply Secondary TaxCheck this box to enable the use of a secondary tax. By default, this box is not checked.

When generating a bill, you will also have to check the tax options in the Generate Bills window.

Time Rounding Options

When you change the time rounding settings on your account it changes how all time entries are displayed in Clio on the activities tab and in the matter tab, even the ones that have already been billed. This will not, however, affect the totals on the bills that you have already generated.

Time rounding affects all users on your Clio account.

Clio allows you to round time to the nearest two decimal places and/or to the next minute increment.

Examples:

To bill time in 10ths of an hour, set the minute increment to "6".

To bill time for every quarter hour, set the minute increment to "15".

Bill States Options

For small or solo firms that do not require a pending approval workflow, the "Pending Approval" bill state can be removed by checking the "Hide Pending Approval" box.

For those firms that need the ability to edit the line items on approved bills, you can enable this by checking the "Allow editing of approved bills and trust requests".

Enable Draft Bill Notifications

For those firms with a draft bill approval workflow, you can enable draft bill notifications.

Draft notifications allow you to select a Clio user to be notified by email or secure message whenever you generate a bill.

For more information about working with draft notifications, see the "Draft Notifications" article.

Payment Profiles allow you to specify the payment terms to be applied to your clients, including:

Payment grace period

Interest percentage and frequency

Early payment discounts

Creating a Payment Profile

The default Payment Profile will be applied automatically to all of your clients unless you specify otherwise.

To edit the default profile, click on the "Edit" link. Or, to create a new profile, click "Create a payment profile".

In the "Edit Payment Profile" window, enter your payment terms.

Payment Terms

PrincipalThe amount of the invoice prior to any interest charges. E.G. Bill Total = $1000

Grace PeriodGrace period is used to calculate the payment due date. Interest will not be charged when a bill is paid before the due date. Interest is calculated for the grace period and added to the bill once the due date has passed. Thereafter, interest is calculated based on the interest period.

Simple InterestInterest is calculated only on the principal, or a portion of the principal.

Compound InterestInterest charged on the principal and any previous interest charges.

Applying a Payment Profile on a Contact Card

If you have created custom Payment Profiles other than the default profile, you will need to apply those profiles to your clients on their Contact cards.

When adding a Contact to Clio or when editing an existing Contact, scroll to the bottom of the Contact form to the "Contact Billing" section.

In the "Payment Profile" field, select the profile that you would like to apply to all Matters and bills for this client.